Defeating Norks militarily

AP/PI:

The U.S. military would prevail in a war against North Korea but at a greater cost in lives than if the United States were not already fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.

"It would not be as clean as we would like it to be, but it would certainly be sure, and the outcome would not be in doubt," said Gen. Peter Pace.

He told a Pentagon news conference that the U.S. military has plenty of people available to fight wars beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, but he acknowledged that U.S.-based ground combat units are not fully equipped.

"We have 2 million folks who can start protecting this nation anywhere else we need them to tomorrow, if we need them to," Pace said when a reporter asked what sort of threat North Korea's military poses.

The fight, however, would be messier than if the U.S. military did not have 147,000 troops tied up in Iraq and about 20,000 in Afghanistan.

"It would be more brute force, wherever we might have to go next, than it would be if we weren't already involved in the war we have going on in Iraq and Afghanistan," Pace said. "Why? Because you need precision intelligence to drop precision munitions. And a lot of our precision intelligence assets are currently being used in the Gulf region. So some of those would not be available if you had to go someplace else."

As a result there would be more unintended damage inflicted, he added.

"You end up more like a World War II, Korean War campaign," he said, adding that he was not making any predictions. "I'm just saying that, on a scale, you're going to have to use more brute force to get the job done" in North Korea.

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Note that what he is saying is that North Korean casualties would be greater because our Predators and other intelligence gathering UAV are occupied in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is not saying that US casualties would be greater. Some have in fact argued that hte precision weapons are in part responsible for the on going insurgency in Iraq because the population did not feel the brunt of the war. Whether that is true or not, North Korea would feel significant blows from an air campaign.